Knowledge discovery agent system and method

ABSTRACT

A software agent system is provided that continues to learn as it utilizes natural language processors to tackle limited semantic awareness, and creates superior communication between disparate computer systems. The software provides intelligent middleware and advanced learning agents which extend the parameters for machine agent capabilities beyond simple, fixed tasks thus producing cost savings in future hardware and software platforms.

TECHNICAL FIELD

The subject invention relates generally to an artificial intelligence system and method. More particularly, this invention provides a system and method for producing intelligent software agents for interconnecting software and hardware platforms.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

The proliferation of specialized technology across multiple industries has led to an expanding problem of connecting together disparate information systems in a way that provides value that justifies the cost of creating interoperability. Many companies desire to harness the collective knowledge of different systems for better management of intellectual assets, improved oversight of their current operations, and optimizing their business processes. As business systems have gotten more complex and the IT components of business processes more spread out, integration software has become more layered and segmented. Often, however, companies find that tools that can successfully aggregate this information provide poor methods for turning this information into knowledge that can be used. Those tools, often termed “middleware,” are designed to connect systems, not enhance them or learn from them. Middleware which syntheses integration, analytics, and process awareness into a package creates new functionality and efficiency while preserving past investments in software and hardware.

Other tools, such as knowledge management software, are able to make some strides toward refining this collected information into usable knowledge. However, there are few solutions that are able to take information from multiple sources and provide an effective wrapping of services and knowledge management. Knowledge management software and its sister field, Business Intelligence (BI), are becoming critical to creating and maintaining competitive advantages within multiple industries. Tools that attempt to fulfill these needs run the gamut from simple document management and organization software to enhanced heuristic or case-based categorizations systems to the most advanced systems that utilize natural language processors to tackle limited semantic awareness.

Software Agents have become more and more ubiquitous in software development in a variety of fields. These autonomous programs lend themselves to popular and diverse applications in the web services (called bots), CRM (customer relationship management) enhancement, “software wrapping” industrial equipment, and new wireless intelligent networking software. In particular, the idea of using intelligent agents as wrappers on legacy systems to make these systems and their software work with new applications and platforms is appealing and can provide a unique solution for industries that have the most acute need for intelligent middleware.

What is needed is a solution to the aforementioned problems which makes middleware more intelligent and profitable for businesses to use

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

The invention relates to software that continues to learn as it runs, thereby creating more valuable knowledge and providing a perpetual return on investment.

A primary object of this invention is to provide new solutions that lower costs and increase the value of existing approaches through types of “process awareness and optimization” that are different from other known products.

Another object of this invention is to utilize natural language processors to tackle limited semantic awareness, thereby producing software which is not only semantically aware but actually approaches real semantic understanding through its proprietary knowledge creation and representation system.

Yet a further object of this invention, is to create superior communication between disparate computer systems. By thinly wrapping applications and data stores with intelligent agents, the present invention minimizes the overhead involved in connecting these systems while maximizing the range of services offered.

An additional object of this invention is to provide intelligent middleware which is far superior to traditional middleware because it enables businesses to access and share the accumulated wisdom of the members of its organization which is normally fused into the business processes and knowledge of an organization and diffused throughout its many systems and locations.

Still another object of this invention is to provide advanced learning agents which extend the parameters for machine agent capabilities beyond simple, fixed tasks by learning on a continuous basis as they are used, thereby becoming smarter and able to do more complex tasks as well as enabling them to optimize their performance as they run. Such agent capabilities lead to ever-expanding and increasingly-efficient delegation abilities in the agents.

Yet another object of this invention is to enable businesses to see a continually increasing return on their investment over the lifespan of software without upgrading any of their other IT investments thus producing cost savings in future hardware and software platforms.

DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENT

A solution to the problems described above is presented by the system and method of the present invention which is comprised of two key components: Digital Reasoning and Data Bonding. Working together, these two components work with both legacy and contemporary systems, learn from that software and its users and translate that learning into increased productivity.

I. Digital Reasoning

Digital Reasoning is a breakthrough synthesis of cutting edge artificial intelligence technologies that promises to break new ground in semantic understanding by machines. Digital Reasoning has foundations in cognitive science, psychology, philosophy of language, and multiple artificial intelligence (AI) approaches. The central differentiator of the Digital Reasoning approach is that it takes an incremental and holistic approach, which ultimately allows software to achieve real intelligence. Rather than attempt to integrate all core aspects of intelligence into the software all at once, Digital Reasoning will continue to add new cognitive functions as each function justifies its value in a real business context. The knowledge representation structure, which is one of the most critical elements of any strong AI, has been designed in a fashion that anticipates many of these additions. Digital Reasoning is built with scalable understanding in mind. Two significant aspects of Digital Reasoning are artificial intelligence in conjunction with neural networks and intelligent software agents.

A. Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the attempt to simulate human judgment in machines. The most typical implementation of AI in a commercial setting is to filter massive amounts of information into relevant, usable pieces using complex software with numerous rules. Another approach to machine judgment and learning, Neural Networks, has become distinct from the field by its use of massive parallel processing models to order unstructured information. There are also advanced statistical approaches to AI, typically referred to as Bayesian Belief Networks or Bayesian Neural Networks, which are used to create unsupervised learning in machines. These approaches make up the core of commercial AI technologies. While AI research has progressed substantially in the past five years with the advent of more powerful hardware, a great deal of the most promising research has yet to be commercially applied. Moreover, there is a pressing need for a way to bring these divergent approaches together that overcomes the shortcomings of each individual approach and stores knowledge in a flexible way that mirrors the conceptual structures of the human mind. In summary, most AI allows computers to extrapolate from existing information to make judgments about future events with only limited success. This invention presents a new knowledge language, Dynamic Molecular Language, that unites these AI approaches and takes them to a new level. Details of this new knowledge language and its implementation are explained in Appendix A to this application which is a part of this specification, is incorporated herein by reference and is made fully a part hereof. The software implementation of these details is set forth in the CD-ROM accompanying this application which is also a part of this specification, is incorporated herein and is made fully a part hereof.

B. Intelligent Software Agents

Agent software development began with the creation of independent task-specific programs, called Bots. Bots are now in widespread use, allowing web sites to provide meta-searches, news updates, and comparison-shopping. True software agents are autonomous programs capable of performing multiple duties or tasks. The synthesis of technologies from agent software and AI led to the creation of Intelligent Agents (IA). IAs can make decisions by utilizing some level of deliberation. By learning from the user and the environment, these current approaches to agent technology create intelligent and autonomous action.

Multi-agent systems are the newest realm of this research (most mainstream academic discussion began in 1998) and have extended agent technologies to create community learning and collaboration. Multi-agent systems have their roots in advanced modeling software and Artificial Life. By assigning rules and behaviors to many small programs, Artificial Life scientists have created simulations of advanced, complex systems such as population growth of certain species in an environment where multiple predators exits. By fusing intelligent agent research with these fields, rapid advancement in software learning becomes possible. Current implementations of multi-agent systems utilize a distributed structure that allows them to spread processing and storage over multiple systems, thereby solving problems faster and more efficiently. These distributed intelligent multi-agent systems represent the cutting edge of agent technology today. This invention adds the advanced agent capacity of intentional agent self-modification to the field of intelligent agents. Such advanced agents will be able to rewrite their code and change their actions while they are running. Details of this advanced agent capability and its implementation are presented in Appendix A to this application which is a part of this specification, is incorporated herein by reference and is made fully a part hereof. The software implementation of these details is set forth in the CD-ROM accompanying this application which is also a part of this specification, is incorporated herein and is made fully a part hereof.

II. Data Bonding

Data Bonding is the process of bringing together data from multiple systems to create collective knowledge and functionality. The goal of Data Bonding, like traditional middleware, is to give businesses a bridge between systems that were not designed to work together. Data Bonding uses a combination of existing translation and systems integration technologies and connects them to a core aggregation engine that brings information together when it is requested. This provides organizations with functionality similar to having a full data repository without the problems of synchronization and overhead of duplicating all of a business' data. At its core, Data Bonding fulfills the role of scalable and flexible businessware.

Data Bonding, however, takes this core functionality several steps further by providing integrated knowledge recognition and organization abilities. Moreover, Data Bonding is “business process aware.” The software is able to bring improvements to a firm's business processes as well as enhanced management of its knowledge assets. By creating virtual repositories of knowledge and business processes, Data Bonding will also give managers unprecedented levels of understanding about their business and allow them to improve efficiency by easily spreading best of breed processes throughout their business.

Further details of data bonding and its implementation are presented in Appendix A to this application which is a part of this specification, is incorporated herein by reference and is made fully a part hereof. The software implementation of these details is set forth in the CD-ROM accompanying this application which is also a part of this specification, is incorporated herein and is made fully a part hereof.

III. Personal Search Agent System

One exemplary implementation of the concepts discussed above and further disclosed in Appendix A and the enclosed CD-ROM is a Personal Search Agent (PSA) which is a multi-phase effort designed to develop a set of search tools using Digital Reasoning and Data Bonding technologies developed by Unetworks. These new search tools learn the users preferences and infer the intent of the user given environmental factors and learned behaviors. This enhanced insight into the user's preferences, environment, and behavior, provide the user with a concise and better-fitted listing of responses to a query.

The features of the PSA include managing selected search engines, learning from the user's behavior, drawing an inference about the user's query to better understand the intent, analyzing the responses collected, building a conceptual network of the knowledge contained in the responses, building a list of categories so the user can focus his/her search, presenting the responses to the user, monitoring the user's behavior and analyzing click stream actions.

The PSA system leverages historical learning to improve its conceptual understanding of the data and better model user intent. Thus, the following benefits result:

-   -   1) With every search, the PSA learns. It gets better at         recognizing key concepts and ranking results more accurately;     -   2) By learning the users interests, the PSA can begin to         recognize the concepts that a user is really trying to get at.         This yields results that are aimed at that particular user's         desires, and therefore far more personalized then conventional         approaches; and     -   3) Since the conceptual networking capacities of the system get         at the key concepts and the key concept relationships in the         results, the PSA has far richer knowledge about the results than         conventional search technology. Moreover, the fact that the PSA         continues to learn with every search and from every user gives         it far more semantically accurate knowledge.

The foregoing invention has been described in terms of the preferred embodiment. However, it will be apparent to those skilled in the art that various modifications and variations can be made to the disclosed method without departing from the scope or spirit of the invention. 

1. A software agent system capable of fully unsupervised learning of associations of natural language artifacts such as phrases, predicates, modifiers, or other syntactic forms and the learning of semantic and syntactic relationships in structured data sources such as is found in entities like relational database systems, tagged files, and XML.
 2. A software agent system able to represent learned relationships in a particular form that allows the mapping between a variety of conventional data structures and languages such as arrays, vector spaces, first order predicate logic, Conceptual Graphs, SQL, typed programming languages (i.e. Java, C++).
 3. That [1] is able to construct hierarchies of association across a state space of term usage that allows the interpolation of (weighted or fuzzy) mapping functions between sets of terms in particular syntactic positions.
 4. That [1] and [3] lead to an emergent structure of weighted or fuzzy mapping functions between sets of terms that is a semantic structure analogous to formal semantic structures such as programming languages, modal logics, frame systems, or “ontologies” of objects and relationships
 5. That [1] is able to learn from sensors that collect the interaction of human users with the system
 6. That [1] is able to use the learning in [5] to reorganize and alter the mapping functions [1] induces from analyzed input, be it structured and/or unstructured, and align them to the natural usage of human users based on the sensors. 